What is considered "vintage" in your opinion?

[thesharkman]

anything that I purchased new at TRU or the like is NOT vintage because if it was, then I am too! =\ LOL. seriously though, I've been buying this stuff for a long time (remember Toy Shop?) and I don't consider stuff that I picked off the shelf to be vintage. stuff from the 90s is definitely not.

thesharkman

[Liu Bei]

For me, anything made before I was born is vintage. No qualifiers of any kind.

I do use vintage to describe the first iteration of a toyline, i.e. vintage Star Wars toy, vintage He-Man toys, or vintage Indiana Jones toys. However, in and of themselves, I don’t think they are vintage toys.

To me, vintage toys are old Japanese tin toys, old cap guns, old Marx cowboy toys, etc…

[Mejo]

For me, "Vintage" toys are pre-plastic ones (porcelain dolls, metal robots, wooden figures, and the like), basically 1940's and earlier. I think in terms of "Early Classic" for toys '50 to '60s, "Classic" from '70s to '80s, "Late Classic" from '90s to '00s, and "Modern" is the '10s to the present.

Remakes or reissues today are either "Retro-Classic" or "Neo-Classic" to me depending on how faithful a repro they are (and sometimes I do want "improvements" to be made, but I also like the faithful reproductions too). Totally biased from a personal perspective. I have no idea how the toy historians and auction markets delineate it.